Mini-Review: Gratuitous Space Battles

“Gratuitous Space Battles” is just like what the name of the game says, it is a gratuitous space battle. A space strategy game from UK indie developer Positech Games. The game doesn’t have a story, but have an incredible management/simulation system that does away with all the base building and delays, it is entire aimed at battles between spaceships with a lot of bombs, laser beams and explosions.

Graphics: The game has a top-down view of the ships, easy to understand and see what is happening, it is not ugly, the game has simple graphics, some ships are really cool and very well designed. The battle sometimes is very nice to watch with all that laser beams coming from everywhere and the HUD is easy to interact and understand.

Gameplay: Well, I will try to explain how the game works. The player can choose a race, each race has many different spaceships and so the player must choose a mission, starting with a tutorial mission where it tell what kind of enemies you are going to face and how many points you will have available to “deploy” your fleet. Each fleet have cost and you can customize this fleets’ ships with modules of new weapon models, shields, armor and much more. However this customization may change the fleet’s cost to deploy. In deploy screen “sometimes” depending on the mission you may be able to see the enemy fleets, and you can try to counter the enemy with a better fleet or a better strategy and position. These customizations are really good and works very well. When you click on “Fight”, the true game start and here you can just literally “watch the battle” and see if the orders and the strategy you set before is working or not, If works, you win the battle, else, you lose. While you watch, you can see exactly what is happening, If your weapon is doing damage, If your shields are working well, the game tells you everything that is happening by visual and by messages. An option also allows you to give orders to your fleets while in battle, but in my opinion the fun is to watch the A.I. trying to do the job. 😉

Sound: It’s perfect, I enjoyed the OST of this game, it has a wonderful musics. And the sound effect, space has no sound, but f*** that, I love the sound of lasers making pewpew and explosions making BOOM everywhere!

Story: The game doesn’t follow a plot, but have its own story for each race you have an overview to understand a little about them and well the purpose of the game is really entire aimed to strategy and management of the ships.

Mods: Of course, like almost all space games there is a Star Wars and Star Trek Mod. 😉

Conclusion: 7.8/10 I really enjoyed this game, is really amazing, probably because I like “space” genre. So I recommend it? yes and maybe, yes if you like “Space movies or Space games”, so you should at least try the demo and “maybe” if you don’t enjoy look ships making pewpew and destroying everything, BUT you like strategy games.